Gregory Little | Lorain County Community College (original) (raw)

Papers by Gregory Little

intelligentagent.com

In the last few decades, a number of artists have used virtual environments (VE) technology to cr... more In the last few decades, a number of artists have used virtual environments (VE) technology to create computer-based virtual environment art installations or what we call Artistic Virtual Environments (AVE). We created AVEs that we have used to explore the aesthetic experience for ...

Intertexts-Webs of Discourse: The Intertextuality of Science Studies, 1999

This essay studies the covert, market driven forces at work in our choices of images for the avat... more This essay studies the covert, market driven forces at work in our choices of images for the avatars inhabiting cyberspace, in order to understand the dangers of the exchange of self-images for advertisements. To forge a set of alternative resistant and forceful conditions for imaging what SherryTurkle has termed "the second self," tactics based in imaging, language, and psychology can be opposed to the insidious and covert co-optation of the self by commodities. This essay is an attempt to examine the construction of alternative figures as models of resistance. The Manifesto for Avatars offers a formal set of oppositional strategies for constructing unconsumable self-images. The apparent freedom of identity and gender enjoyed by the participants in multi-user domains and the Internet in general (Langley, Stone) is a dangerous illusion, masking the corporate agendas dominating the nature and spirit of the construction of cyberspace and avatars. Imagine an internet chat room wherew e are all represented by the commodity of our choice. Much like the large, recognizable logos that corporeal jackets, sneakers, tee-shirts, and hats model, in this virtual environment our veryr epresentation, our self image, becomes an emblem of the production and accumulation of goods. The irony in the physical world is that we choose to wear these commodities and we willingly pay multi-national corporations for the privilege of advertising their products. Through this transaction we express personal fantasies, achieve a fleeting sense of democracy and individual expression, and fulfill various levels of desire.

NMC|Media-N Journal of the New Media Caucus, 2011

The history of animation, more than other artistic genres, is closely tied to technical innovatio... more The history of animation, more than other artistic genres, is closely tied to technical innovation. The animators Oskar Fischinger, Mary Ellen Butte, and John Whitney, for example, were also inventors and engineers. Their non-objective animations and the hybrid, often transgressive machines they built, can be categorized as part of the Modernist avant-garde. Their work was characterized by the development of an abstract, reductivist language, the visualization of non-visual phenomena, and an independent machine aesthetic that paralleled the radical expansion of technological innovation in the culture at large. Harold Rosenberg wrote in "Past Machines/Future Art" that for artists like Boccioni and Duchamp: "The history of the machine in art consists largely of the responses of artists to mechanisms of fantasy and to objects that are out of date or broken down or have changed into something else."

ISEA2011 17th International Symposium on Electronic Art, 2011

In 1999 I published “An Avatar Manifesto”, an essay that posited a historical and theoretical def... more In 1999 I published “An Avatar Manifesto”, an essay that posited a historical and theoretical definition of the avatar, contextualized the avatar among other types of representation, and articulated a set of poetic strategies for building avatars intended to resist the inevitable construction of virtual space as a new utopian shopping mall. The essay referenced Donna Haraway's “Cyborg Manifesto” of 1986 and used Artaud's trope, 'The Body w/o Organs' as a point of reference for the construction and articulation of
representations of the self within digital, virtual space. In the current essay, “Avatar Manifesto Redux” I will revisit the definition of the avatar, and bring specific trajectories of the the avatar to bear on current state of avatar research and construction. I find at least four recurring variants on the avatar to be of interest: the profile, the portrait, the tool, and the double.

Technoetic Arts: A Journal of Speculative Research, 2004

In this paper an expanded model of a constructed planetary self is sought, informed by the meta-d... more In this paper an expanded model of a constructed planetary self is sought,
informed by the meta-discipline of “synnoetics”-a term coined in 1961 by Louis Fein in unpublished documents, to describe “the cooperative interaction, or symbiosis of people, mechanisms, plant or animal organisms, and automata into a system that results in a mental power (power of knowing) greater than that of its individual components.” (Fein, 1960) As the Net has brought about the death of the Cartisian cogito and the collapse of the Oedipal narrative, monolithic identity is renounced and replaced by a constructed identity of ubiquity.

Synnoetics takes us one step further, as we are able to consciously construct a Synnoetic self as an aesthetic oeuvre, further challenging traditional notions of singular, monolithic identity and extending notions of the postmodern, decentered self into simultaneously new and ancient selves defined by shape-shifting, Psi-interaction, and cumulative, distributed, inter-species knowing.

It is my position in this paper that the parallel trajectories of development in
nanotechnologies; research in Psi and anomolous phenomena, and the proliferation of ubiquitous technologies has created a medium for the creation of a synnoetic self. The merger of these research agendas represent a fourth stage in the development of cybernetics, as the research facilitates an entirely new channel for information exchange and communication between humans, plants, animals, and machines, and consequently, for the construction of a planetary, aesthetic, beyond the human, self. The role of technology shifts, as it is used not to augment or extend human consciousness, but to measure the extent to which the boundaries of human, plant, animal, and machine consciousness
are not known. For example, in Psi phenomena, consciousness needs sensitive technology to be understood and directed, thus consciousness augments technology, not the other way round. Psi phenomena as a form of wireless communication may be of profound importance to the future development of interactive ubiquitious interfaces, synnoetic intra-species minds, and a new undefined context for aesthetic experience.

Intelligent Agent, 2003

Interactive, telematic art is the child of developments in cybernetics, electrical engineering, m... more Interactive, telematic art is the child of developments in cybernetics,
electrical engineering, mathematics, and computer science; arguably as much as it is the offspring of art history. The predictions and concerns of the pioneering scientists that developed these fields facilitated radical new potentials for interactivity in artistic practice. In the 1960s, the visionary scientists J. P. L. Licklider and Douglas Engelbart began to work toward the realization of a human-centered, intelligence-augmenting research model for computers, setting an agenda for interactivity as mutual action between humans and digital computers, for the purpose of human communication, creativity, and transcendence. In the late 1960s, Louis Fein, in making
a comprehensive projection of the growth and dynamic inter-relatedness
of "computer-related sciences," includes specific mention of the
enhancement of human intellect by the cooperative activity of men, mechanisms, and automata. He profoundly expanded the range of interactivity when he coined the term "synnoetics" to describe the cooperative interaction of people, mechanisms, plant or animal organisms, and automata into a system the mental power of which is greater than that of its components. These scientists mapped a path for the development of human/computational interactivity that solidly places at the center the creation of a symbiotic or synnoetic, distributed "mind" whose powers of human realization and transcendence are greater than the sum of
its parts. After nearly 40 years of speculation and development in interactive art, a critical look at the genre through this synnoetic lens could help define future paths in the genre.

intelligentagent.com

In the last few decades, a number of artists have used virtual environments (VE) technology to cr... more In the last few decades, a number of artists have used virtual environments (VE) technology to create computer-based virtual environment art installations or what we call Artistic Virtual Environments (AVE). We created AVEs that we have used to explore the aesthetic experience for ...

Intertexts-Webs of Discourse: The Intertextuality of Science Studies, 1999

This essay studies the covert, market driven forces at work in our choices of images for the avat... more This essay studies the covert, market driven forces at work in our choices of images for the avatars inhabiting cyberspace, in order to understand the dangers of the exchange of self-images for advertisements. To forge a set of alternative resistant and forceful conditions for imaging what SherryTurkle has termed "the second self," tactics based in imaging, language, and psychology can be opposed to the insidious and covert co-optation of the self by commodities. This essay is an attempt to examine the construction of alternative figures as models of resistance. The Manifesto for Avatars offers a formal set of oppositional strategies for constructing unconsumable self-images. The apparent freedom of identity and gender enjoyed by the participants in multi-user domains and the Internet in general (Langley, Stone) is a dangerous illusion, masking the corporate agendas dominating the nature and spirit of the construction of cyberspace and avatars. Imagine an internet chat room wherew e are all represented by the commodity of our choice. Much like the large, recognizable logos that corporeal jackets, sneakers, tee-shirts, and hats model, in this virtual environment our veryr epresentation, our self image, becomes an emblem of the production and accumulation of goods. The irony in the physical world is that we choose to wear these commodities and we willingly pay multi-national corporations for the privilege of advertising their products. Through this transaction we express personal fantasies, achieve a fleeting sense of democracy and individual expression, and fulfill various levels of desire.

NMC|Media-N Journal of the New Media Caucus, 2011

The history of animation, more than other artistic genres, is closely tied to technical innovatio... more The history of animation, more than other artistic genres, is closely tied to technical innovation. The animators Oskar Fischinger, Mary Ellen Butte, and John Whitney, for example, were also inventors and engineers. Their non-objective animations and the hybrid, often transgressive machines they built, can be categorized as part of the Modernist avant-garde. Their work was characterized by the development of an abstract, reductivist language, the visualization of non-visual phenomena, and an independent machine aesthetic that paralleled the radical expansion of technological innovation in the culture at large. Harold Rosenberg wrote in "Past Machines/Future Art" that for artists like Boccioni and Duchamp: "The history of the machine in art consists largely of the responses of artists to mechanisms of fantasy and to objects that are out of date or broken down or have changed into something else."

ISEA2011 17th International Symposium on Electronic Art, 2011

In 1999 I published “An Avatar Manifesto”, an essay that posited a historical and theoretical def... more In 1999 I published “An Avatar Manifesto”, an essay that posited a historical and theoretical definition of the avatar, contextualized the avatar among other types of representation, and articulated a set of poetic strategies for building avatars intended to resist the inevitable construction of virtual space as a new utopian shopping mall. The essay referenced Donna Haraway's “Cyborg Manifesto” of 1986 and used Artaud's trope, 'The Body w/o Organs' as a point of reference for the construction and articulation of
representations of the self within digital, virtual space. In the current essay, “Avatar Manifesto Redux” I will revisit the definition of the avatar, and bring specific trajectories of the the avatar to bear on current state of avatar research and construction. I find at least four recurring variants on the avatar to be of interest: the profile, the portrait, the tool, and the double.

Technoetic Arts: A Journal of Speculative Research, 2004

In this paper an expanded model of a constructed planetary self is sought, informed by the meta-d... more In this paper an expanded model of a constructed planetary self is sought,
informed by the meta-discipline of “synnoetics”-a term coined in 1961 by Louis Fein in unpublished documents, to describe “the cooperative interaction, or symbiosis of people, mechanisms, plant or animal organisms, and automata into a system that results in a mental power (power of knowing) greater than that of its individual components.” (Fein, 1960) As the Net has brought about the death of the Cartisian cogito and the collapse of the Oedipal narrative, monolithic identity is renounced and replaced by a constructed identity of ubiquity.

Synnoetics takes us one step further, as we are able to consciously construct a Synnoetic self as an aesthetic oeuvre, further challenging traditional notions of singular, monolithic identity and extending notions of the postmodern, decentered self into simultaneously new and ancient selves defined by shape-shifting, Psi-interaction, and cumulative, distributed, inter-species knowing.

It is my position in this paper that the parallel trajectories of development in
nanotechnologies; research in Psi and anomolous phenomena, and the proliferation of ubiquitous technologies has created a medium for the creation of a synnoetic self. The merger of these research agendas represent a fourth stage in the development of cybernetics, as the research facilitates an entirely new channel for information exchange and communication between humans, plants, animals, and machines, and consequently, for the construction of a planetary, aesthetic, beyond the human, self. The role of technology shifts, as it is used not to augment or extend human consciousness, but to measure the extent to which the boundaries of human, plant, animal, and machine consciousness
are not known. For example, in Psi phenomena, consciousness needs sensitive technology to be understood and directed, thus consciousness augments technology, not the other way round. Psi phenomena as a form of wireless communication may be of profound importance to the future development of interactive ubiquitious interfaces, synnoetic intra-species minds, and a new undefined context for aesthetic experience.

Intelligent Agent, 2003

Interactive, telematic art is the child of developments in cybernetics, electrical engineering, m... more Interactive, telematic art is the child of developments in cybernetics,
electrical engineering, mathematics, and computer science; arguably as much as it is the offspring of art history. The predictions and concerns of the pioneering scientists that developed these fields facilitated radical new potentials for interactivity in artistic practice. In the 1960s, the visionary scientists J. P. L. Licklider and Douglas Engelbart began to work toward the realization of a human-centered, intelligence-augmenting research model for computers, setting an agenda for interactivity as mutual action between humans and digital computers, for the purpose of human communication, creativity, and transcendence. In the late 1960s, Louis Fein, in making
a comprehensive projection of the growth and dynamic inter-relatedness
of "computer-related sciences," includes specific mention of the
enhancement of human intellect by the cooperative activity of men, mechanisms, and automata. He profoundly expanded the range of interactivity when he coined the term "synnoetics" to describe the cooperative interaction of people, mechanisms, plant or animal organisms, and automata into a system the mental power of which is greater than that of its components. These scientists mapped a path for the development of human/computational interactivity that solidly places at the center the creation of a symbiotic or synnoetic, distributed "mind" whose powers of human realization and transcendence are greater than the sum of
its parts. After nearly 40 years of speculation and development in interactive art, a critical look at the genre through this synnoetic lens could help define future paths in the genre.